Theatre review: The Earthworks

Like the black holes that form in the Large Hadron Collider, shows in the Young Vic's Clare space are small in scale, and are pretty much over as soon as they've opened. The latest of these is Tom Morton-Smith's The Earthworks which takes place on the night before the Collider's official opening in 2008 - not at CERN itself, but in a Geneva hotel where various interested parties are staying. Most are asleep because they've got work to do in the morning, but journalist Clare (Natalie Dew) is up late in the hotel bar: The online science correspondent for a broadsheet, her actual speciality is biology, and she's being kept awake by wanting to understand the physics enough to write a proper article about it, not just rehash a press release like usual.

The only other person up so late is Fritjof (Mark Edel-Hunt,) a Swedish physicist from Edinburgh University, who doesn't work at CERN but knows Professor Higgs, of boson fame, so has wangled an invitation to the big day.

Clare tries to quiz Fritjof and get the more personal flavour that she needs for her article, but while she does get to understand some more of the science over the course of the evening, it becomes more of a personal connection. If she doesn’t end up colliding with his large hadron it’s not for lack of trying, but they’re both married (to other people,) both in love with their spouses but with complications we get to know more about. In the short time they know each other they even manage to acquire a nemesis in Anemone Rasmussen’s clipped hotel night manager Herta, who keeps dragging them into her office for a telling-off. Given that they’ve been yelling in the corridors at night in the land of No Flushing After Bedtime, they’re lucky to get off so lightly.

I don’t consider myself scientifically minded but there’s a certain element of theoretical physics that feels indistinguishable from fantasy, and that theatre can be very good at tapping into. Given Morton-Smith has previously written hard science in Oppenheimer and fantasy in My Neighbour Totoro, it’s not entirely surprising if he’s successful at putting the two together here. It’s in quite a concentrated form, but if the encounter between the characters is short but moving and impactful, so is the encounter with the play, which does eventually hinge on actual science fiction (the concept of Slow Glass isn’t Morton-Smith’s invention, but it is an invention.)

Andrea Ling’s production (as part of the Genesis Future Directors Award) has the conceit of being part of an installation: Emma Bailey’s very orange set, which has the audience piled around a cross-shaped stage, has various bits of exhibition-like informative text on the walls, and after the actual play ends the audience is invited to stick around while Bethany Gupwell’s lighting continues to provide displays inspired by the Slow Glass in the story, and a couple of boxes are wheeled on that create low-frequency sound from touch. I don’t know that it’s enough that I’d call it an actual installation and I didn’t stay long, but the idea of getting the audience to hang back and talk to each other around these experiments does seem a fitting companion piece to the play’s ideas about scientific theories being a mirror for human connection, even if in practice this postscript doesn’t quite come off.

The Earthworks by Tom Morton-Smith is booking until the 6th of April at the Young Vic’s Clare.

Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Laima Arlauskaite.